A Pennsylvania court has ruled that some school bus video can be considered public under the state’s Right to Know Law in a 2016 case involving a principal’s wife charged with accosting a student.

In its order Monday, Commonwealth Court rejected a central Pennsylvania school district’s argument that all surveillance videos must remain secret because they contain private student information, pertain to funding and are related to investigations.

The ruling could lead to another round of lobbying to get the Legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf to change the public records law involving school videos — just as they did with police videos after a different court ruling in 2017.

The ruling did not address a broader policy question about balancing the public’s right to know with a school district’s right to protect students’ privacy and safety, said Ellen C. Schurdak, a school solicitor with the Bethlehem firm King, Spry, Herman Freund & Faul.

It could require school districts to release unedited video footage of cafeterias, hallways and elsewhere to someone with ill intentions, Schurdak said.

“It is a big change in tradition in Pennsylvania,” said Schurdak, whose law firm was not involved in the case.

“I respectfully disagree with that,” countered Melissa Melewsky, a lawyer for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the reporter.

“This decision did not say every video gathered by a school district is public,” Melewsky added, because the law has built-in mechanisms, including 30 exemptions, that allow government agencies to keep certain records secret. Those exemptions also prevent people from making blanket, vague requests for information, including videos, she said.

“The primary mechanism is presumption of access, burden of proof and exemptions to the law,” Melewsky said.

The case involved a television reporter’s request for a copy of a tape involving an adult who walked onto a school bus to confront a student in the Central Dauphin School District. The adult was Erica Rawls, the wife of one of the district’s principals. She was charged with criminal harassment in the matter.

The mere fact that a record has some connection to an investigation does not automatically exempt it [from public disclosure] under … the Right-to-Know Law.— Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt

During Rawls’ preliminary hearing, a portion of the school bus video was played, the ruling states. The student was identified in open court; the harassment charge was later dismissed.

Valerie Hawkins, a reporter for Fox 43 News, in February 2016 sought a copy of the tape under the Right to Know law.

The law says records are not public if tied to ongoing criminal or internal investigations, if releasing them could jeopardize federal or state funding, or they contain private information that is not part of an official government record.

Citing all those reasons, the district said it could not release the video.

Hawkins appealed the district’s rejection to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, which overturned the district’s denials. OOR found the video was incidental to a noncriminal investigation. The district appealed OOR’s ruling to Dauphin County Court and lost again when a judge determined the tape was not part of a student’s official, permanent record as defined by federal law.

Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt, writing for the majority, relied in part on a prior ruling involving a school bus video in the Easton Area School District.

Commonwealth Court ruled this year in Easton Area School District v. Miller that a school bus video that showed a school teacher roughly disciplining a student was not an education record.

“We explained that an ‘education record’ has a reach beyond a student’s academic transcript,” Leavitt wrote. “However, the school bus video at issue was not an ‘education record' because it did not directly relate to a student. Rather, it directly related to a teacher’s performance.”

The high court’s 5-2 ruling granted a Centre County woman’s request for recordings of a car crash involving a friend. The justices rejected state police claims that all dashboard videos are exempt investigative records. Instead it found that police had the burden to show on a case-by-case basis why a video shouldn’t be released.

After the high court ruling, the state Legislature approved and Wolf signed a law exempting police audio and video recordings from having to be made public under the Right-to-Know law.

That exemption, however, does not extend to school districts or other government entities that use surveillance videos.

“As our Supreme Court has directed, each claim that a record is exempt as relating to an investigation must be decided on its unique facts,” Leavitt wrote. “The mere fact that a record has some connection to an investigation does not automatically exempt it under … the Right-to-Know Law.”